Many bank payment and loan systems are written in COBOL. Banks are so afraid to change them that there are often not even plans to upgrade them. When a change absolutely has to be made, they need to call the developers back from retirement...
As crazy as it would be to learn COBOL today, I've heard you can pretty much name your price for these sorts of jobs. They're definitely out there, too -- I saw one job listing in 2014 for a postal worker credit union that was looking for someone to pick up rudimentary COBOL from a pending retiree so they could still support their system.
I'm not so sure - I ran into quite a few COBOL developers during my travels around India. Funny thing was that in every case the programmer was younger than the codebase.
Indeed. A friend once told me that while he was studying Spring (years and years ago) his friend decided to steer toward something else: COBOL. Years later this guy is still dealing with such a "tool" - only difference: object oriented cobol - lol!
